OAKLAND — It’s been said you don’t really know a man until you walk a mile in his shoes. But in the case of Warriors guard Jarrett Jack, that might take awhile.

Jack, an NBA veteran who is fast becoming a valuable addition as the team’s primary reserve, has a major thing for shoes — basketball sneakers, specifically. In fact, he probably has the largest collection of them in the league.

Jack claims to own more than 1,500 pairs of sneakers, many of them hard-to-procure limited editions, and he rarely wears the same pair twice in a row, whether it be in games, practices or out on the town.

“There are only 365 days in the year,” he said. “So I can only wear so many.”

Jack, 29, is in his eighth NBA season but his first with the Warriors after being acquired via trade in July. His new teammates are only beginning to learn the scope of his fixation, but have noticed he always has the flashiest size 12s on the floor.

“He’s worn a different pair of shoes every single day this year,” said guard Stephen Curry. “I have not seen a shoe game like his.”

Rookie Draymond Green, who has his own love for athletic footwear, thought he might be able to match Jack’s sneaker cache until he peered into the veteran’s locker one day. He quickly admitted defeat.

“I’m just not at the point in my career where I can keep up with him,” Green said. “I’ve only seen some of his collection, but he’s got quite a few steps on me.”

“Draymond just saw my collection here and said, ‘Yeah, I guess I can’t really compete,’ ” Jack said. “And I said, ‘You’re worried about this? You haven’t even seen The Warehouse.’ “

At his permanent offseason home in Atlanta, where he played collegiately at Georgia Tech, Jack had a room in his house designed just to hold all of his shoes. He has shelves from floor to ceiling on every wall.

He only has a fraction of his collection in Oakland, but he still has more than enough to keep him in fresh footwear every day. He could probably outfit the whole team if necessary. He admitted that keeping a traveling assortment has created storage issues at some of his NBA stops, though.

“I remember when I had a condo in one city and I didn’t have many places to put them, so I started putting them in cabinets,” he said. “You’d go into the kitchen to get a cup and there’d be shoes in there.”

Warriors equipment manager Eric Housen, who is responsible for keeping track of shoes and other uniform garb for the entire roster, simply had to hear Jack’s name in connection with the word “shoes” to offer a raised-eyebrow response.

“Oh, lord,” Housen said. “Jarrett might take six pairs for a one-game road trip, and we’re about to leave on a trip for 15 days, so I’m sure I’ll have a whole bag to keep track of. He’s definitely a sneaker-head. I haven’t seen his entire collection, but I know we already have a ton at the facility.”

Since Jack is contracted to Nike, he only wears its shoes and those of that company’s subsidiaries, which includes Converse. As fate would have it, he spent his first four NBA seasons with Portland, site of Nike’s international headquarters, where he got the inside scoop on new releases and saw the process of shoe design up close.

But why such a fascination for athletic shoes?

“You know, it’s fashion at the end of the day,” he said. “In high school, I started to understand that what you wear is an expression of yourself — your clothes, shoes, hats, accessories. And then there are the girls. Girls always look at a dude’s shoes. They want to know if he has nice feet.”

As teenagers growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, Jarrett and his younger brother Justin would scour websites and magazines trying to learn release dates for specific shoes months in advance.

“We’d try to figure out how we were going to save our money to get them,” he said. “Once, we bought some shoes together — he would wear them one day and I would wear them the next.”

Once he became an NBA player, Jack started receiving many pairs of free shoes through his Nike contract. But he also buys them. Albeit a bit embarrassed to admit it, Jack said he has paid as much as $2,000 for a pair of sneakers.

Limited editions are his prized possessions. His favorites are Nike shoes designed by young patients at Portland’s Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in concert with professional designers. The children create footwear that expresses their personal stories, while raising awareness and funds for the hospital.

“I just think that’s a very commendable thing that Nike does,” Jack said. “Those are kids who don’t get to experience playing basketball or Little League. But they get to do something we would all love to do at any age.”

It’s at least something Jack would like to do. Once his playing career is over, he sees a corporate future that will somehow involve sneaker design.

“I’ve always been passionate about it,” he said. “So there wouldn’t be nothing forced on me.”

Carl Steward has been a sportswriter for Bay Area News Group newspapers for more than 40 years, covering all manner of sports as a beat writer, columnist and jack-of-all-trades reporter. He has covered numerous Super Bowls, World Series, major golf tournaments and even did turns covering horse racing's Triple Crown and soccer's World Cup. He has also written the popular light-hearted "Darting Here and There" column for many years.

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